TITLE:
Filming History from Below: Microhistory as Cinematic Practice
AUTHORS:
Abdeghni Dahman
KEYWORDS:
Historical Film, Microhistory, Moroccan Goumiers, Resistance, The Lovers of Mogador
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.4,
April
13,
2026
ABSTRACT: This paper foregrounds the historical film as a form of historical documentation capable of shaping and reframing our understanding of the past. It examines how Souheil Ben Barka’s The Lovers of Mogador (2002) detours around colonial representations of Moroccan resistance that reproduce narratives of inevitable submission and European military superiority. By visually reconfiguring Hubert Lyautey’s pacification campaign (1912-1925), the film reimagines southeastern Morocco not as a passive periphery but as a stronghold of sustained military resistance, thereby highlighting the agency of Moroccan guerrilla fighters. Grounded in a microhistorical approach, the paper further investigates the ambivalent position of Moroccan goumiers, indigenous colonial soldiers, who are torn between two conflicting realities: stigmatized as traitors within local memory, while relegated to subordinate roles within the French military apparatus. That said, the paper argues that, through such narrative and visual strategies, historical cinema enables a re-staging of the past that renders its ambiguities visible and destabilizes mainstream historical narratives.